03. God in us

03. God in us

Galatians 2:19-20

‘I live, no longer I. It is Christ who lives in me.

And the life I now live in the flesh,

I live by the faith of the Son of God,

who loves me and gives himself for me.’

Justin. I Apologia 61,131

‘This very name of God is not His name, for if anyone dares to claim that God has a name, he is mad. These words of Father, God, Creator, Lord and Master, are not names but words to call Him because of His Goodness and works. The word God is not a name but an approximation, which we find natural when we attempt to explain the unexplainable.’

Gregory Nazianzen.

‘O You, who are beyond everything,are not these words all that can be sung about You? … What hymn could tell about You, what language? No word can express You …Only You are unutterable. Only You are unknowable …You are all beings and You are none of them . . .Yours are all the names, but how will I name You,the only One who cannot be named? . . .O You who are beyond everything,is this not all that can be sung about You?’

Isaiah 43:2

‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;and through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you;when you walk through fire you will not be burned,and the flame shall not consume you’.

God is ‘God with us’.

Exodus 3:12

To Moses: I will be with you

Genesis 26:3

To Isaac: ‘I will be with you.’Genesis 31:3

To Jacob: ‘I will be with you.’

Judges 6:16

To Gideon: ‘I will be with you.’

Deut. 31:23 (also Joshua 1:5; 3:7)

To Joshua: ‘I will be with you.’

Matthew 28:20

‘I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Matthew 1:23

‘They will name him Immanuel, which means, “God is with us”. [see Isaiah 7:14]

Colossians 1:15,19

‘The Messiah Jesus, God’s beloved Son, is the image of the invisible God … God was pleased for all the fullness to dwell in him.’

2 Corinthians 5:19

‘In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.’

Hebrews 1:3

‘God’s Son is the brilliance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.’

‘From the Heart of Jesus pierced on Calvary, I see a new world coming forth – a great and life-giving world, inspired by love and mercy: a world which the Church must perpetuate on the whole earth.’

(Sacred Heart 1900)

Jules Chevalier msc

‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father … I am in the Father and the Father is in me’ (John 14:9-10).

‘I will ask the Father and he will give you the Spirit to be with you for forever’ (John 14:16).

‘I am coming to you’ (John 14:18).

‘My Father will love you and we will come to you and make our home with you’ (John 14:23).

‘If only you knew the gift of God … If you drink of the water that I will give you will thirst for nothing else. The water that I will give will become in you a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’(John 4:10, 14).

‘By dying on the Cross – as Saint John tells us – Jesus “gave up his Spirit” (John 19:30), anticipating the gift of the Holy Spirit that he would make after his Resurrection (cf. John 20:22). This was to fulfil the promise of “rivers of living water” that would flow out of the hearts of believers, through the outpouring of the Spirit (cf. John 7:38-39).

Pope Benedict XVI God is Love n.19

God the ‘Father’

Jesus, God’s Son

The Dance, The Song, Love

The Dancer, The Singer, The Lover

God’s Spirit

The Dancing, The Singing,The Loving

‘The‘The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the hierarchy of the truths of faith’ (Catechism n. 234).

We accept that God is love, because we have experienced the Lover (Jesus) and the Loving (the Spirit) that inspires the Christian community in its relationship with God and with one another. We find this truth expressed throughout the New Testament.

Galatians 4:6

‘God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”

2Thessalonians 2:13

‘God chose you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth.’

1Corinthians 6:11

‘You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.’

‘There are varieties of charisms, but the same Spirit; there are varieties of ministries, but the same Lord; there are varieties of ways of exercising power, but it is the same God who inspires them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.’

Power

Lord (Son)

God (Father)

Spirit Ministry

Charism

1 Corinthians 12:4-7

2Corinthians 13:13

‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.’

Romans 8:9

‘You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.’

Romans 8:15-17

‘You have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.’

Knowing that God is Spirit reminds us to be attentive to the divinely inspired movements of our own heart: movements of longing as we yearn for closer communion with God whose Spirit inspires us; movements of wonder and praise as we rejoice in God being with us. It reminds us to be sens i t i ve to these movements in every man and every woman.

Knowing that God is Word reminds us to be attentive to the words and actions through which God speaks to us, and the words and actions through which we respond to God. We learn, too, to reverence the sacred ground of each person’s Spirit, and be attentive to each person’s Word , a s together we journey towards God who i s the Source (‘Father’, ‘Mother’) of all.

Knowing that God is Father reminds us to open our hearts to God’s love and to treat every other person as our brother or sister.

• On one level when we speak of the Trinity we are saying that God, the one and only and always transcendent Source of everything that exists, is experienced by us through God’s Word and God’s Spirit, and finally in the man Jesus who is the perfect human expression of God, God’s Word-made-flesh, and who gives us his Spirit that we may share in his communion with God.

God : Trinity

Knowing that God is Trinity opens the way to see God differently. While never wavering from Monotheism, and while knowing that we humans cannot comprehend God, we came to think of God as One, not in the sense of an individual, but as Communion of Love.

The Triune God is ‘Word’ that faces towards this Source, and gives expression to the Self-bestowal of being by calling creation into existence so that everything that exists participates in God’s Being.

The Triune God is the Love-communion that is the essence of God’s being and that sustains everything in existence and draws everything into divine communion.

Thanks to Jesus we know in faith that the Triune God is the Self-bestowing Source of everything that exists.

The ‘Trinity’ of God, Jesus and the Spirit alerts us to the truth that we can understand creation only when we acknowledge the relationship of every creature to God who holds everything in existence and God’s Holy Spirit that energises everything and draws everything to find itself in participating in the Being of God.

John 1:1,14

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was towards God, and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of the gift of truth.’

It is the eternal Spirit that fills Jesus’ heart and that he gives without reserve (see John 3:34).

‘The perfection of God is the perfection of love, of communion, or personhood. Divine perfection is the antithesis of self-sufficiency. Rather it is the absolute capacity to be who and what one is by being for and from another. The living God is the God who is alive in relationship, alive in communion with the creature, alive with desire for union with every creature’ (page 304).

Catherine LaCugna God for us: the Trinity in Christian Life (Harper 1991)

‘God is so thoroughly involved in every last detail of creation that if we could truly grasp this it would altogether change how we would approach each moment of our lives. Everything that exists manifests the mystery of the living God’ (page 304).

Catherine LaCugna

Indwelling: John of the Cross

‘O most beautiful of creatures, transcendent spirit, who long to know where your beloved is and where you may find him so as to be united with him. He dwells within you. You are yourself the tabernacle, his secret hiding place. Rejoice, exult, for all you could possibly desire, all your heart’s longing is so close, so intimate as to be within you; you cannot be without him.’

(Spiritual Canticle 1,7).

‘The Word, the Son of God, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is hidden in the innermost being of the soul’ (Spiritual Canticle 1,6).

‘God, whose attributes are called "lamps of fire", dwells in us and favours us with his love. He says to the soul: I am yours and for you. I am delighted to be what I am, so as to be yours and to give myself to you’ (Living Flame 3,6).

‘The spirit of God insofar as it is hidden in the veins of the soul is like soft refreshing water, which satisfies the thirst of the spirit, and insofar as it is exercised in the sacrifice of loving God, it is like living flames of fire’ (Living Flame 3,8).

‘The soul is like the air within the flame, enkindled and transformed in the flame, for the flame is nothing but enkindled air’ (Living Flame 3,9).

‘Enter within yourself and work in the presence of your Spouse, who is ever present loving you’ (John of the Cross, Maxims on Love n.11).

O living flame of love, tenderly wound my soul to its deepest inner heart, without oppression. Come, consummate our love, tear through the veil of our union. If it be your will come and rend the veil of the temple.

Yet gently your hand does wound as you rend through the veil of my temple.Come, take this life that I give, So that I might come to live in this our dying.

O lamps of fire in deep caverns of feeling, Once obscured and blind Are now leading in the warmth and the passion of Your love.

‘We are enclosed in the Father, and we are enclosed in the Son, and we are enclosed in the Holy Spirit. And the Father is enclosed in us, the Son is enclosed in us, and the Holy Spirit is enclosed in us’ (Julian of Norwich, "Showings", chapter 54).

Indwelling

‘I thought that my heart would always be within God’s heart, and God's heart always within mine.’

(Angela of Foligno)